Conference Agenda

Climate change is increasing inland flood risk, yet little is known about the economic returns to large-scale adaptation investments. We provide the first national-scale causal evaluation of the Dutch Room for the River program, Europe's largest integrated flood-risk adaptation initiative, using more than 78,000 repeat-sale housing transactions. The program combines grey and nature-based projects and is characterized by long, staggered implementation horizons. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation across projects, we identify housing market responses to project announcement, construction, and completion. We find that announcing Room for the River projects increases property values by 1.9%, while construction activity induces short-run price declines of 2.7%. Upon completion, housing values rise by 2.3%, with capitalization effects reaching up to 15\% four years later. Post-completion effects are strongest in urban areas and among older housing stock, and vary systematically with flood risk exposure. Distinguishing between adaptation types, nature-based measures generate large but highly localized premiums, whereas grey interventions produce smaller yet more spatially diffuse effects. Aggregated capitalization benefits of €4-8 billion imply benefit-cost ratios between 1.1 and 2.3, indicating that integrated flood-risk adaptation delivers substantial welfare gains.